February 27 2008
Comcast and other VoIP service providers
What is the difference between Comcast and any other VoIP phone service? Granted Comcast VoIP is certified in Harris county to carry fire alarm calls, beyond that it really doesn’t matter whether you are using Comcast’s phone service or if you sign up with a third party like Lingo or Vonage.
Out of all of these providers, I’ve found Lingo to provide the best service and best rates, especially for international calls. Keep in mind, your phone service is only going to be as good as your internet service. If you experience latency issues or huge lag times, as many Comcast customers have experienced, then VoIP may not be such a good idea.
Here’s a quick test, if you have a windows machine click Start, Run and type in CMD then press enter. At the prompt, type in “ping www.google.com -n 30″ without the quotes.
Note the column that starts with “time=”. If these times vary too much and are really high like 190ms or higher then VoIP may not be a good idea. If you get any “request timed out”, then again VoIP may not be a good idea.
I switched from Roadrunner (before it became Time Warner and then Comcast) to a Cbeyond BV1 package because of up time issues and response times. The BV1 package comes with a service level agreement so it’s not just a best effort service but a guaranteed service.
I couldn’t agree with you more! I have Comcast at the house and it has been a nightmare. Firstly, their maintenance window is between 8am and 5pm..second, their support is horrible! The only thing that they have going for them is fast and cheap….I get an average of 8Mbs down and 2.5Mbs up…with their speedburst I get up to 21Mbs down for the first 20Mb of downloaded data! I can’t get that anywhere for $39 per month! But, that is just residential and doesn’t require “constant” service. I certainly would not rely on it for my business as the problems have outweighed the benfits.
I remember when I used to have cable internet, if the service went down, phone tech support could only schedule an onsite tech over 7 days in the future!
Finally I gave up my Comcast cable TV as well, when I called in to cancel the lady was nice and tried every trick in the book to keep me as a customer. Finally the lady said she cannot cancel the service as I have to take the set top boxes in to a Comcast location or if they do a truck roll to pickup their boxes their will be a service fee!!! I guess Comcast is big enough where they don’t have to take care of customer anymore.
An update about what’s happening at Comcast, if you are with Comcast and have static IPs, your static IP addresses maybe changing (if you haven’t already been contacted by Comcast). This is usually not a problem if you are not hosting any services in-house, but if you have static IPs then you probably are using them.
Apparently after Comcast bought the cable division of Time Warner, the ownership of IP space was not included and Time Warner now wants its IP space back.
voip priviuders…
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